The challenges of ‘big data’ for military, security and intelligence domains subject of UB workshop

“What has accelerated is the quantity and breadth of information, and our desire to reason over its internal interconnections.”

Dale Walsh, principal scientist

Mitre Corporation and Army Intel Fusion SME

BUFFALO, N.Y. – According to IBM, human beings produce 2.5
quintillion bytes of data every day and 90 percent of the data in
the world today was created in the past two years. Sensors gather
it from everywhere: social media sites, digital pictures and
videos, security data, commercial transaction records, research in
every field, cell phone GPS signals, military communications, and
email records to name a few.

The result is the proliferation of “big data,”
enormous data sets that most relational database management systems
(Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, etc.) find difficult if not impossible to
process because they require massively parallel software running on
tens, hundreds or even thousands of servers.

“Ontologies for Information Integration” (OI2), an
April 18 workshop at the University at Buffalo, will address
non-traditional solutions to the problem of capture, curation,
storage, search, sharing, analysis and visualization of big data in
order to improve the interoperability of US government
information.

It will be held from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Zebro Room, NYS
Center for Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, 701
Ellicott St., Buffalo.

The event will be of particular interest to ontologists, the
intelligence and military communities, data analysts and
information architects interested in awareness of and collaboration
between ontology-sharing efforts in the era of big data.

“The age of information extraction, processing and
analysis has begun its return to the free-text, unstructured forms
that prevailed until 30 years ago,” says one of the speakers,
Dale Walsh.

“What has accelerated,” he says, “is the
quantity and breadth of the information, and our desire to reason
over its internal interconnections. For modern goals to be
achieved, a level of semantic analysis must be developed, which
will need to be rooted in the use of adaptable and flexible
ontological contexts.”

The workshop will be hosted by the National Center for Ontological Research
(NCOR) at UB and CUBRC, Inc., which researches, develops and tests
systems integration programs. It is being organized by Barry Smith,
Ph.D. SUNY Distinguished Professor, UB Department of Philosophy,
and the director of NCOR, and Ron Rudnicki, senior research
scientist at CUBRC, and will include presentations by leading
figures in ontology and military information, sharing, among
them:

Col. Ronen Cohen, former director of the terror desk in
the Directorate of Military Intelligence, former head of Terrorism
Arena, and deputy head of the production division of the Israel
Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Directorate: "Terror
and Intelligence Ontologies"

Barry Smith, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor of
Philosophy, University at Buffalo Julian Park Chair: "The Role of
Ontology in the Era of Big (Military) Data"

Also presenting their work and research in the field will be a
number of panelists who will discuss ontology and data fusion, and
challenges facing “big ontology,” in relation to both
technical coordination and ontology governance. Panelists who will
address the ways in which ontologies are being developed to address
information integration needs of large government projects in areas
such as civil information and air traffic control are:

The Workshop will also review the work of the Distributed
Development of a Shared Semantic Resource (DDSSR) initiative,
sponsored by the US Army's Intelligence and Information Warfare
Directorate (I2WD).

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